Tues July 20 --
San Diegobound
Yep, I'm off to San Diego Comic-Con (more on that in seconds), so this
week's Tuesday update has the new strip, like so:

San Diego! Woo-woo!
Awright, I've been runnin' around this year like a Mexican ocelot, and
I've gotta say I'm kinda relieved this is the last trip I've got
scheduled. I'm pretty ready for Comic-Con this year though, I think.
This'll be my first C-C with the UBOPE (what? that old thing?), and I
finally got some nice fabric with which to cover the table, and I found
some sweet little bookholders at Staples as well as a collapsible
trolley that should make moving boxes of books a cool breeze on a
sweltering summer afternoon. All is in readiness. This time I should
even have a working cell phone!

I've got a pretty good spot in Small Press Area, table M16 on
Ailse 1400, the westish side of the northish end of the
ever-more-sprawling San Diego Convention Center. Comic-Con goers please
feel free --nay, obligated-- to stop by and say howdy.

Charleston Alert 2
Well, the Charleston
City Paper looks like they've wrapped up the e-voting on their web
page discussing the cartoon contest they were having. If any of you
folks voted for me, thanks very much, and if you Charleston cats still
have paper ballots to fill out, do it, man, DO IT!

Movie reviews
Nothing new since last update for movie reviews, but I gotta see
Catwoman tonight so I'll try to throw that up here before I take off
tomorrow morning.** mini-update ** Here
we go, Catwoman as promised.

Leaden Angels
I was a bit late getting the latest chapter of the Leaden
Angels to Paul, so as of this
mid-afternoon update I don't have it for y'all. I'll see if I can
squeeze it in with the Catwoman review tonight.
** another mini-update ** And here's the new chapter, the very silly The Invasion of Medicine Hat, in which
Constantine's sister Lucian berates the owner of a Christian bookstore
and faces an invasion of... ah, but that would be telling.Fri July 16 -- Super
Mega-Update
Astute readers will have noticed there was no Tuesday update this week,
a truth for which I have no explanation at this time. But! We here at
angryflower.com have a pile o' stuff for you for being so patient.

First, this week's strip:

The horribleness, the horribleness...

Charleston Alert!
If any of you readers reside in Charleston, SC I urge you to vote in
the big let's-pick-a-new-cartoon contest they got going on right now at
the Charleston City Paper.
I don't know if they've enabled e-voting or if they're only counting
real paper ballots, but any help you Charlestonites could throw my way
would be hugely appreciated! Yeah! Baby! Let me get into an AAN paper!
So sweet!

Paul Notley novel
action
My brother's book The Leaden Angels just
keeps coming. This week's instalment is The
Parliament of Gryphons, in which quasireal MP Ignatius Wilentz
disapproves of Elizabeth's mother, Pr. Hermann gets hypnotized, and
John Seinkewicz takes a trip and learns of the Casket of Dreams.

Links dumping
It's been a while since I did any links dumping and I've got an Inbox
bulging with recommendations, so let's check 'em out --together! First
up is a link to a story that describes how Kofi
Annan loves cartoons. Weird. Then we've got a link to an old Chinese man robot
much like the one from the old strip "Copy Wrong".
And of the small but steady trickle of people with flower delivery web
sites I figure, what the hell, why not include a link to maryjanesgarden.com, even
though I think from now on my policy is gonna be that if flower web
sites wanna get mentioned on angryflower.com they gotta buy an ad
(Whoops! Just checked the site out now and I find it's a
marijuana-selling outfit rather than a flower-buying site. Oh well, no
harm done.) The
people at Serebella.com wanted
a link on my site in return for putting a link to angryflower.com on their
crowded "B" page, so I guess I'll indulge them. And here's a link
to a pretty good article that discusses some
interesting modifications we should see in Real-Time Strategy games
now that real life has pointed the way.

Fish's Web Page
My longtime colleague Fish Griwkowsky finally, finally, finally has a
web site, Zardex.com, which is
still young but already features some good photos and
a startlingly complete archive of his Space Cat comic. Examine and
evaluate.

San Diego Comic-Con
It's coming, coming like a freight-train, San Diego Comic-Con, the biggest
comix event of the year and I, I say I will be there. I finally got my
table placement, M16, right on the edge of the small press area like I
wanted. Sweet. Click here for
a floor map if such things excite you, and if you're gonna be at the
show, please swing by and say Howdy.Fri July 9 -- Where's the Sunshine, dammit?
Despite the general raininess around here, I'm in okay spirits. I wish
I had something to rant about this week but I honestly can't think of
anything; I'm just giddy at how the Bush machine seems to be crumbling
on all fronts. Fahrenheit 9/11, Abu Ghraib, Kerry's pick of Edwards for
his VP... the best the Bushes can do in response these days is pull out
another phantom terror alert. They're stil holding out for their stage-managed
Osama-catch, but let's face it, they're gasping.

Best not to get too cocky, of course. The more desperate and doomed
they get the more dangerous they'll become, and if it looks like they
can't win in the political arena they'll just move the battle
elsewhere. Still, I'm getting good feelings about this century...

Also...
I'll be heading off to the San Diego Comic-Con in short order, just
under two weeks. I'm kinda excited about it, as I get about all of
these trips, but I hope to sell plenty o' UBOPEs to hapless
Comic-Conners despite that it's now over six months old. But so good!
And hey, y'know, if you haven't read Lovebot Conquers All (only
available in the UBOPE or at Graphicsmash.com)
you haven't read Lovebot.Tues July 8 -- Mid-week Pseudo-action
Well, now, let's see... Looks like John Kerry has picked John Edwards
as his running mate in Somebody Grab The Wheel 2004. Seems like a good
choice, better than wet noodle Dick Gephardt would've been, at any
rate. I give it about an hour before the GOP spin machine starts
denouncing Edwards as an evil "trial lawyer" forcing poor defenceless
corporations to cough up millions of dollars just because of a little
gross negligence.

Texas pics
Not a lot, since my photo-taking was more incompetent than usual, but
for those interested the pictures are here.

Leaden Angels 2.1
We surge forward into my brother Paul's novel The
Leaden Angels. This week's chapter: The
Drowned Librarian, in which Inspector Tyrone speaks in shorthand,
prehensile ears are revealed, and Pr. Hermann has a chat with God.

Movie reviews
I fail you; I have no Spider-Man 2 review since I haven't seen it
again. I do have a review of Will Farrell's latest Anchorman, though, so that's something.Fri July 2 -- Texas Unexpected
Whew... this update's a little later and a little thinner than I'd
normally like, but I'm still getting my poo together after a Juneful of
travelling and partying. So, first, this week's strip:

Texas?
As I should have expected, Texas wasn't what I expected. For one thing,
it rained every day, hard. For another thing, I kinda expected to hear
some Texas twangs, some y'alls n' howdys, and I pretty much didn't.
Admittedly, San Antonio was something of a bubble of Association of
Alternative Newsweeklies people rather than Texans, but still.

AAN was okay. I've got some photos but I haven't gotten them developed
yet; if any turn out okay I'll put 'em up. As for getting into any
papers, I got a couple of nibbles just like I do every year, so we'll
see, though the Charleston City Paper is gonna do a "readers pick their
favorite cartoon" thing in a bit so when they do I'll be urging all
Charleston Bob readers to say they like Bob.

Austin was... well, kinda wack. I stupidly thought there'd be some
connection due to the Edmonton-Austin sister city thing, but of course
Texans and Austinites don't really give a crap about Canada or whether
some part of Canada is more like Texas than any other part. After all
my culling of what-to-do-in-Austin advice I mostly just ended up
crashing on the couch of a friend of mine, sweating, drinking a lot and
watching the rain, so I only really got a blip of an impression of the
town. Next time I'll have to go for longer.

How was Spider-Man 2?
I liked it, liked it a lot. I missed out on the chance to write a
review and get paid for it but I will write something up once I get a
chance to see it again and mull it a bit. It's more comic-booky than
the first, more episodic in feel, with less of a dramatic throughline
than I would have liked; you can really tell the action sequences were
conceived and planned more than a year before the script was actually
written. At the same time it's way more emotional and satisfying than
the first film; Ock ruled and I was wiping away tears near the end so
I'm pretty happy with it. It's weird to think that Spider-Man and
Fahrenheit 9/11 are going toe-to-toe and even weirder to note that of
the Americans I talked to in Texas, all were eager to see 9/11 and none
so much as mentioned Spidey.Thurs Jun 24 -- Mini-update
Nothing much extra here, I just wanted to throw a little bit of Austin
info out there in the hopes of maybe running into someone who'd like to
talk to me while I'm down there from Sunday Jun 27 to Wednesday Jun 30.
I should be checking out the Alamo Drafthouse movie theatre Monday
night, I'm thinking, there to see the classic gross Italian horror
flick The Gates of Hell. I
also wanna check out some Austin comic stores, so if any of you
Austinite Bob readers have any suggestions, e-mail me. I'll be checking my
e-mail while down there, so, yeah. E-mail me. Especially Rich
Cornelisse if he reads this, the bastid.

Oh Yeah --
Spider-Man!
I almost forgot! Spider-Man opens, I think, this Wednesday, at which
time I wanna go see a noonish show at a good theatre somewhere in
Austin. If any of you folks out there know a place or wanna go with me,
e-mail-o-rama, baby.

The Leaden Angels
Didn't get a Leaden Angels update for you
last week but I've got one this week, Chapter 5, otherwise known as Party Pepper Politics, in which two of the main
characters meet and talk some serious books at a party and the Flannery
O'Connor Brigade makes its
first big move. Also has a blue talking bouncing ball.AND!!
I haven't mentioned this before, but you should click on the text ads
on the left side of the page, particularly the "Fun Free Games" one,
that's Popcap, they rule. I'm sorry the ad text looks so crappy; I
haven't found time to fix it and I'm taking off in 6 hours. But click
the ads, why doncha?

And buy books.Tues Jun 22 -- Off to
San Antonio
Well, not yet, but I leave on Thursday for the Association of Alternative
Newsweeklies Convention, there to attempt for the fourth time to
shmooze some editors into running my cartoon. Each time I go to this
thing I try to excuse how brutally expensive it all is with the notion
that if I get even one more paying gig out of it, it'd be worth it, and
each time I fall short of that one new paper by one new paper. Ah,
well, at least I'll get to hang out with Keith Knight and Ted Rall and Jen Sorensen and Andy Singer for a while. That
should be fun, and there's always some free booze at these things,
so.... PARTY!!!! And then Sunday, to Austin. Wacky! And if any of you
Austinite Bob readers out there know Rich Cornelisse, tell him I'm
looking for him.

The new strip comes early this week on account of my trip:

Reviews
With all the runnin' around I haven't had the chance to do too many reviews, though I did see the incomprehensible
Chronicles of Riddick. Oh, and I also saw Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, so there's that also.

Oh yeah, you know what's coming...

BUY MY BOOK!Seriously!Fri Jun 18 -- Home Again
Whew! What a crazy week it's been! I've been off in Vancouver watching
people get married while the whole country is getting all
election-crazy! It's freaky!

Okay, a cartoon, one that didn't run in Vue this week due to a tricky
screw-up on my part involving my Bob file mailouts. Dammit!

Kinda miffed at myself for botching that. On the other hand, I'm pretty
happy with the two cover images I did for that same issue of Vue that
*did* run; I'm throwing 'em up here cuz I like 'em.

First the cover of the Hot Summer Guide issue...

and the interior Hot Summer Guide...

And yes, I know now that the surfboard is upside-down. Can you tell I'm
from a landlocked town?

Crazy Week -- AAN
Yep, no sooner am I back than I have to do a pile of stuff and then
head out again, next Thrusday, this time to swelteringly sunny San
Antonio, home of the Alamo, for the swingin' Association of Alternative
Newsweeklies convention, there to try to convince editors to run my
stuff cuz it's so bitchin and cuz I need the money. It's kinda crazy
that I'll be down there at this time; it means I won't even be in
Canada the day of the election (Newsflash for American readers: we're
having an election in Canada). Instead I'll be swanning around Austin,
Texas finding out if it's really as cool as everybody says it is (of
course if I find it not cool that will only be a measure of my own
coolness failure more than any definitive comment on the city). A few
weeks ago I asked Austinites to write
in with suggestions of stuff to do or offers of crash space; I do so again, now, here. If
you wrote me before, remind me again.